“Why do you not drop the whole thing and begin
working for some one else?” he asked.
Joe looked indignant.
“A man wants independence,” he said.
When Sam got again upon the road he stopped at a little
bridge over a stream, and tearing up Joe’s note
watched the torn pieces of it float away upon the
brown water.
Through the summer and early fall Sam continued his
wanderings. The days on which something happened
or on which something outside himself interested or
attracted him were special days, giving him food for
hours of thought, but for the most part he walked
on and on for weeks, sunk in a kind of healing lethargy
of physical fatigue. Always he tried to get at
people who came into his way and to discover something
of their way of life and the end toward which they
worked, and many an open-mouthed, staring man and
woman he left behind him on the road and on the sidewalks
of the villages. He had one principle of action;
whenever an idea came into his mind he did not hesitate,
but began trying at once the practicability of living
by following the idea, and although the practice brought
him to no end and only seemed to multiply the difficulties
of the problem he was striving to work out, it brought
him many strange experiences.
At one time he was for several days a bartender in
a saloon in a town in eastern Ohio. The saloon
was in a small wooden building facing a railroad track
and Sam had gone in there with a labourer met on the
sidewalk. It was a stormy night in September
at the end of his first year of wandering and while
he stood by a roaring coal stove, after buying drinks
for the labourer and cigars for himself, several men
came in and stood by the bar drinking together.
As they drank they became more and more friendly,
slapping each other on the back, singing songs and
boasting. One of them got out upon the floor
and danced a jig. The proprietor, a round-faced
man with one dead eye, who had himself been drinking
freely, put a bottle upon the bar and coming up to
Sam, began complaining that he had no bartender and
had to work long hours.
“Drink what you want, boys, and then I’ll
tell you what you owe,” he said to the men standing
along the bar.
Watching the men who drank and played like school
boys about the room, and looking at the bottle sitting
on the bar, the contents of which had for the moment
taken the sombre dulness out of the lives of the workmen,
Sam said to himself, “I will take up this trade.
It may appeal to me. At least I shall be selling
forgetfulness and not be wasting my life with this
tramping on the road and thinking.”
